


Bedside

by carriedon_awolfsback



Category: Ghost (Sweden Band)
Genre: 1st person, Doctor/Patient, Hurt/Comfort, Mating Cycles/In Heat, Other, POV character is a ghoul, POV character is not gendered, Sickfic, Well-intentioned malpractice, Whump, a bit of blood/medical yuckiness, but just a little bit, snuggles with tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-18
Updated: 2018-10-01
Packaged: 2019-07-14 00:35:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16029335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carriedon_awolfsback/pseuds/carriedon_awolfsback
Summary: “Your Eminence, with the utmost respect, please take off those robes and get into bed and don’t succumb to a poisoning just to make a fool out of one po-faced doctor.”





	1. Day Shift

“Oh, Your Eminence,” I said, unable to mask the dismay in my tone. “Why didn’t you come to me with this straight away?”

“It can’t be that bad. It doesn’t feel so bad.” His grimace as he stretched the lacerated skin shrugging the unbuttoned layers of his vestments off his shoulders betrayed his words somewhat. “Surely it just needs, you know, a clean and some stitches, no?”

“When and from who did you get this?” I traced the jagged score marks that ran from Copia’s right collarbone to the centre of his bared chest with my fingertips, carefully angling my own claws away from the flesh. I had no fear for myself at touching the raw red wound, nor would my touch add any extra lasting harm to its bearer, but it deeply concerned me to see the extent of the dark bruising that was blossoming under the skin with a much more thready, spiderweb pattern than a simple soft tissue impact mark.

“I believe I got too much in the way of one of your compatriots in heat and their similarly inflamed quarry.” He clearly winced briefly at my touch, but feigned normalcy right away as soon as he could compose himself. “This was, ah, three days ago now.”

“And this progression?” I asked, unable to keep the sharpness down. “Three days of bruising and without the wound drying, and that seemed normal to you?”

“It seemed fine,” he protested. “It looked shallow; I dressed it myself with antiseptic and on the second day it seemed dry. It was only this morning that I wake up and find it open and bleeding again, and this-” he indicated the tendrils that spread out from the dark bruise around the cuts, looking like the bare branch-tips of trees- “spreading like this”. He scowled down at himself. “There was nothing in the wound. It’s been washed and covered. There should be no infection.”

“Bacterial damage is not your problem,” I frowned, still tracing the thickest black marks with one fingertip. There was a good reason the majority of the hospital staff was made up of ghouls of all elements- our diagnostic tests were much, much faster and more conclusive than a human fiddling with a tube full of blood and a microscope. I could feel the presence of the infection reflecting back from him into my hand. In my mind’s eye, in the unknown thing I’d seen and thought with before the Ministry pulled me through the planes to serve on this one, my element showed me all it could in its own way- water poisoned by the squeezed and leaking fangs of a snake, or the rotting of a dead thing at the bottom of a well. “This is envenomed.”

“Poisoned?” The Cardinal’s hackles rose like an animal. “But you can control this, no? Even in the haze of heat?” His eyes suddenly looked very stony and sunken in their sockets thickly smudged with the black paint of office, staring past me. “So. He must have chosen to impart venom to me.”

He wasn’t wrong. Heat makes you vicious and stupid, enough to leave a nasty slash on someone, but not enough to fully envenom your claws and teeth against them without making the active choice and thoroughly realising the consequences. But that was absolutely not something I wanted to get involved with, and not something I needed him prioritising now. “You know damn well how potent this stuff can be,” I warned him, changing tack. “I can’t let this leave my sight. You’ll have to stay overnight.”

He raised an eyebrow. “For this? You are kidding me.”

“I’m serious. And so is this. This would have been a simple solve if you’d come straight to me or one of the other physicians on the day, but this is going to be much harder to shake now.”

“It looks like nothing. I’ve received deeper wounds handling kits.” I very much doubted that, but he flapped his hand over the cuts irritably. “You are positive this is infected and not just bruised? It feels fine.”

“Of course I’m positive.” I appreciated his surprise that one scratch could impart enough venom to be a danger, but not the implication that I made such glaring mistakes. “Believe me, Your Eminence, I appreciate how many tasks and pressures you undoubtedly have on your plate. I would have absolutely no reason to want to keep you in here, taking up a bed, unless I felt the situation was serious enough to warrant prioritising over your duties. How have you felt since waking? Any unusual aches or temperature changes?”

He snorted harshly, still barely contained from his earlier realisation that someone had made a purposeful attempt on his life, although his anger was also very understandable even if unhelpful. “Once a human reaches a certain age, Doctor, there are no unusual aches, I’m afraid.”

I took a chance and gave him a severe, schoolteacher look. “And once a ghoul reaches a certain age, Cardinal, which I guarantee is significantly in excess of yours, we learn to smell concern radiating off a man even before he admits to it. Keeping information from me definitely won’t slow this down or lessen it, but it may well make it far, far worse.”

He had the decency to look chastened. “Since this morning I felt a little hot, yes. I thought it was just unseasonable weather.”

“You’re going to have a beast of a fever to go through.” I shook my head. “What else?”

“I had no appetite since waking, either. Only sipping drinks.” He mimicked my shaking gesture, perhaps for comfort. “But genuinely, no pain I can’t account for as normal.”

“Well, that’s better than it could be.” I lightly pinched a peak of skin on the back of his bare hand, which fell back into place satisfactorily, to test hydration. “When you say you drank, you mean taking decent fluids, I take it? Not just a large Communion wine with lunch?”

“Please, give me some credit. If things are bad enough to be day-drinking, I’ll be dipping into a tasteful supply of my own, not mooching off the cheap stuff.”

I grinned to myself at his faux offense as I went rifling through the chilled cabinet below my desk. The Ministry’s facilities may have come on leaps and bounds since I arrived, but there were some things that called for the old remedies. I nudged aside some vials of blood moon-charged water and selected two or three packets that contained acrid-looking pre-prepared powders, shaking a generous helping of each directly into my palm, letting him watch but not too closely. I only turned aside briefly to focus and call up three even droplets of lukewarm water, which slipped into being from under my index claw and into the powder mix like the first patters of a desert rain. When I turned back to his curious face, I was swirling that claw in my palm, the pale powder grounds folding into a paste and taking on a sealike blue-green hue. He questioned nothing, but kept watching my hands, part curious and part impressed.

As I mixed, something occurred to me. “What were you doing around ghouls in season, anyway? Were they contravening the confinement rules?”

My own heat wasn’t due for another week, and the obligatory period of quarantine with any brethren who happened to be afflicted at the same time would be a hassle and require much awkward untangling of events later if anything serious resulted from the unions that would come about- but the thought of being allowed to roam the corridors feral and embarrassing myself and snapping at the humans was much worse.

“No.”

“Then why were you in the quarantine quarters?”

“Do you need to know that for my treatment?”

I raised an eyebrow. “No, but I do think it’s an interesting piece of contextualisation.”

“Then you are asking too many questions.”

I raised both eyebrows but said no more. I wasn’t sure I wanted to follow that enquiry to its conclusion. “Alright. Take a seat.” The medicinal salve for his wound completed, I gestured to the examination table, which would put his chest at my eye level. I kept my face carefully immobile as he tried to maintain his dignity hopping his lithe but short frame up backwards onto the edge, the sleeves of his partially open cassock bunching around his thin wrists.

I came to stand before him and showed him the scentless mix in my palm. He inclined his head once in consent, apparently unconcerned as to the contents. That struck me as a little foolhardy, given how he came to be here, but at the same time, I felt a seed of trust and pride blossom pleasantly in my throat like a jasmine flowering tea. I dipped the pads of two fingers in the salve and held it up to his chest. It was a gesture not entirely unlike our customary salute, and I wondered for a moment how much we looked from the side like two musty figures one could’ve picked out in any of the old stained glass windows around the main Ministry complex.

“I warn you now, this is going to hurt you a lot more than it’s going to hurt me.”

He gave a wry, brittle smile at that. “Well, I do appreciate honesty. Let’s get it over with, huh?”

The vicious wheezing hiss that escaped him the moment I touched the salve to his lacerations confirmed my suspicions that he vastly underestimated my warning. “I’m sorry,” I said softly as I continued to smooth it on in small circles through his shuddering. Above me he set his jaw hard, but his hands gripped the side of the examination table with white knuckles and his right foot tapped agitatedly. Even tending to the other side of his chest I could feel his heartbeat pick up under my hand.

I’d felt fragility in humans before many times. I was no true surgeon, just a stauncher of blood and dispenser of medicines, but I knew more about their soft innards and flimsy bones than most would ever want to unless they were being served up on a canteen tray. If I focused, I could sense the delicate veins and dark rich heart and liver inside him, see their shapes and colourations picked out in water droplets in that mind’s eye. It felt like secret and dangerous knowledge to sense the famous Protege’s quite literal soft underbelly, his adrenaline ebbing and flowing under my hand. I felt heat on the back of my neck and a pang in my own chest, where my own heart would have been if I was his kin. That some humans could be so powerful in their aura and station but so very weak in body still moved me, even after many years of my practise.

“Almost done,” I promised, taking another daub of salve from my other palm. He only grunted in the affirmative, and ground his teeth so hard when I applied it I could hear his jaw joint click. He exhaled hard in relief and hung his head when I pulled my hand away from the wound, now glistening a sickly grey colour between the mix of blood, bruising and bluegreen salve, and moved to the sink to disinfect my hands.

“So, what now? I can go?”

“Absolutely not, I told you.” I scrubbed my hands vigorously with paper towels which met their end in a meticulously covered and sealed hazard bin. “This isn’t a mild flu that will fizzle out in isolation. This is a unique reaction and you’ll need to be monitored and medicated periodically by someone who knows what they’re doing.”

“Nothing is amiss just yet,” he argued, gesturing up and down himself. “Surely I can get a few chores done before I must-”

“And if you sequester yourself in your office or the back of the library and the fever comes on suddenly?” I fixed him with the most dangerous look I dared bring out against a man of his standing. “And nobody knows where you are, if you fall and take a head injury, or go into a seizure from the high temperature? Absolutely not. It is my job now to prioritise you above whatever petty stuff might interfere with your treatment, whether this is a personal errand, or a whim from the Grand Papa himself.”

At that, he visibly relented. It seemed my vehemence even in the hypothetical face of the Papa made him see the seriousness of what I described, at the acceptable price of some of his comfort as a patient. “Do I at least get a private room for my indignity?”

“Of course.”

I walked ahead of him, ensuring the reception area was empty save for the desk attendant as I ushered him through the space and past the private-marked doors at the back. He clasped his undone vestments shut over his chest tightly, concealing his injury even in the empty corridor beyond. The room I took him to was small and blue, furnished only with a bed and small writing desk under the narrow window, but it was a good bed with plump pillows and he seemed to accept it as his temporary home.

“So,“ he said archly, “I suppose I get into bed now like a sick child and Mother will take my doctor’s note to the teacher?”

“His Unholiness will be advised that you are unavoidably indisposed for the next day or two and be obliged under our rules to be discrete with the details, if that’s what you mean.” I saw the displeasure in his eyes. “He will understand and respect my decision, Cardinal. I assure you, you aren’t the first senior clergyman I’ve ever confined to quarters and I doubt you’ll be the last.”

“Only if I don’t make it,” he said dryly.

“Your Eminence, with the utmost respect, please take off those robes and get into bed and don’t succumb to a poisoning just to make a fool out of one po-faced doctor.”

The corners of his mouth twitched with amusement at the command but he obeyed. Kicking off his shoes he fully divested himself of the upper half of his black cassock and his buttoned undershirt, grunting as the shoulder movement strained his injury again, and let the rest fall to the floor and stepped out of it without bothering with the other buttons. I expected him to hand it to me with a quip about taking care of it, but he retrieved and folded it quietly himself and placed it on top of the shoes on the desk’s chair, then reached for the bedcover, his heavy suit trousers still on.

“You’ll be uncomfortable with those on,” I warned him. “I’d get rid of them too if I were you. No need to stand on ceremony here.”

“Ah.” He tucked his thumbs through his belt loops and looked down reflectively. “It would be no problem to me to do this, but, uh, you may not feel the same way.”

I sighed heavily. It took a lot of willpower to keep my tail from going rigid with irritation. “You’re not wearing anything under there, are you?”

He gave a concessionary grunt.

“I am a doctor, in case you’d forgotten. I’m sure even you aren’t concealing anything that would shock me out of professional composure. I could just make you take them off anyway,” I said sharply.

“‘Even me’?” He leaned back a little with a spreading grin that showed a lot of slightly crooked teeth, apparently adequately distracted by that from the open wound and still-burning salve smeared across his chest. “What does this mean?”

Sneaking around the rut confinement quarters, and now playing some sort of boyish game with me, his soft-haired chest and belly exposed with his hips canted like that, even with a dose of venom seeping through his system? I could see at least some of the many rumours which swirled around Copia were true; both about his obnoxiousness and his appetites. “It means give me your door key, I’m going to send someone to your quarters to pick up your sleepwear.”

His wolfish grin stayed fixed. “You assume I have some.”

I thrust my hand out for the key, which he deposited in my palm. “Fine. I’m going to send the nearest Sister to rifle through your underwear drawer with no time limit. Don’t blame me if you find yourself in urgent need of a trip to the tailor after they’re done with the place.”

His laugh followed me out of the little room. “You can tell her the most interesting stuff is in the bottom bedside cabinet drawer on the right, if you like.”

I opted to withhold that nugget of information from the poor girl I sent from the general care desk to retrieve his essentials, to keep it from my own mind as much as anything else.

Rut was a week away, for crying out loud. It was a long time since I had been a youth that boiled over even before the season was fully here. While the Sister was gone I took it upon myself to tidy her desk and think about the most un-sensual medical procedures I could recall, instead of returning to the side of the incorrigible man waiting for me.

When I came back to the private room, Copia was already looking a fraction more wan than he had done when I left him. He had clambered onto the bed and was leaning back against the headboard, the hair at his temples mussed as though he’d been rubbing them. I had a mishmash of things in my arms that the Sister had gathered from his room- his day-to-day diary with a biro clipped haphazardly onto the cover, a plastic wastepaper bin bag with various grooming items at the bottom, the charging cable for a mobile phone, a surprisingly worn but cosy-looking red bathrobe with an endearingly tacky gold monogramme on the breast pocket (I made a mental note to enquire one day what the first initial stood for), and a neatly folded bundle of black cotton which I was confident were a t-shirt and boxers, but was trying not to appear too curious about. I placed them on the bed beside him.

“Here. Now you can change, and settle in.” I turned my back as he swung his legs back off the bed and his hand went for his zipper, and I scrutinized the light fitting above us studiously while I heard the shuffle of fabric behind me.  
I was expecting him to have bundled up in his soft robe when I turned back around, but instead he was hanging the robe and t-shirt over the back of the chair beside the bed along with his day clothes, clad only in his shorts. The curve of his back and the sharp straight lines of his legs looked long and elegant despite his small stature, something you couldn’t normally see in his day to day wear.

“This is enough cover, yes?” He asked, although it definitely did not feel like a sincere question. His smirk was present again, as though being the object of attention was giving him a genuine medicinal boost. What a groundbreaking medical discovery that would be if it could be replicated. “It’s more comfortable for me. As you said, you are a doctor. Hopefully I’m not the worst thing you’ve ever seen in an infirmary, yes?”

“Suit yourself,” I sighed, feeling thoroughly checked in a chess game I had at no point really agreed to play. “You’d only have felt far too hot in the robe later anyway. Now- if you need assistance, you have a call button beside the bed here,” I gestured, “but I’ll be in and out anyway now and then to make sure you’re getting enough water. I would strongly advise you make yourself comfortable now while you have the energy, because once your body starts combating the infection properly, it will come on quick. You have a long night ahead.”

Actually, I suspected we both did. I was the most well-informed person about the Cardinal’s condition, as of now, and I already knew I would not be happy ceding the night shift to someone else.


	2. Night Shift

The afternoon was a quiet one, mercifully, that afforded me many opportunities to check on my valuable charge. The first few times I looked in on him, Copia was still comparatively chipper, seated on top of the sheets with his long legs crossed over one another, working on some note or other in the back of his diary. He did complain of a headache at first, which I provided pain relief pills for, and for the time being that seemed to work. I would push another glass of cold water into his hand when I visited and wait patiently as he sat up and finished it under my supervision, and he would watch me from the corner of his discoloured eye as he did so.

As the day wore on, though, he began to look less and less comfortable, rubbing his still-tense temples and wiping at his brow and the back of his neck. By the time I looked in on him at the hour I would normally complete a day shift, he was balled up on his side with the sheets swirled around him, limbs limp, the diary discarded on the floor beside the bed, his injury standing out dark and harsh on his skin.

“Ah. Yes, you’re into it now,” I said softly, placing my hand on his shoulder gently as I tested his temperature with a small digital thermometer that slotted into his shallow, rounded little ear. He made a small noise of discomfort at that; I felt the sharp tips of my own ears flick in sympathy.

“Is this normal?” He asked weakly as I glanced at the result display. 102 degrees. It would get worse before it got better, I knew.

“It’s very normal.” I indicated his cuts, which were still surrounded by dark bruising, but the ominous tendrils under the skin had receded noticeably since I had applied the salve. “You’re burning off the venom, essentially. It’s receding back to the infection site, where the salve will dry it out. I’ll need to put a dressing on you to help the absorption.”

He didn’t need any more salve; I dressed the gauze pad only with the mild brand-name antiseptic I’d apply to any human with a flesh wound. “Little sting,” I warned softly as I pressed it to his skin, and he only huffed sadly and screwed his eyes shut, too fatigued to complain. I adhered it to his skin, nipping sterile tape off a roll with my claws, apologising too for the hair-pulling his chest would undergo when it was time to unpeel and change the dressing, but he just pushed his sweat-damp cheek into the pillow and stayed quiet. Somehow it would have been far better if he’d been chatty or whiny about it; his listlessness compared to his cockiness earlier was stark and though not unusual for the situation, still concerning.

When I finished smoothing the dressing onto him and stood to wet some clean cloths with cold water to place him, he suddenly held his hand up to me.

“Stay?”

He looked… frightened, the anxiety in his deep-set, bleary eyes settling in my gut like a heavy ball. The slow death sentence of the venom had been- I was confident in my abilities- averted with what for me was pretty elementary equipment and knowledge. The danger of fever in otherwise healthy adult humans which remained for him seemed pale in comparison. His look was awash with a fear that, to me, seemed rooted beyond the not insignificant physical discomfort he was in. But I wasn’t a seer, and I couldn’t follow its trail; I could only sense it was there, a cold, fraying black thread in the energy coming off him.

“Have you ever been this sick before?”

To this day, I still don’t know where the question came from. It just rose totally unbidden in the back of my mind, and once there, passed to my mouth and escaped without seeming to go through any rational process on the way.

“Once,” he said, and somehow the way he said it was even more uncanny than the question I hadn’t realised I was about to ask.

I felt very, very strongly, again without any reason I could exactly place the source of, that I didn’t need a more in-depth explanation than that. 

I tried not to let any confusion bleed through into my expression. “If you made it through that, I promise you, you will make it through this with me,” I assured him, stretching my hand to his and letting him squeeze my fingers until his little reserve of energy was spent and his arm fell back. “I’ll be back to stay soon.”

 

***

 

I wolfed my evening meal in the dining quarters, urgently wanting to be away from the infirmary for as little time as possible, leaving some to tip into a plastic container which I’d take with me to help sustain the long night ahead. “You’re leaving that?” The male sat also by himself on my right enquired with a grin, reaching a claw at my dish.

“I have a double shift tonight and I’m taking it with me,” I growled defensively, showing my sharp tail-tip over my head in an arch. Maybe it was a little excessive for the situation; he backed off immediately with some clear offense, but I was under enough stress. 

He had smelled ever so slightly like rut hormones, like he’d just been released from seasonal quarantine that day. It made my head swimmy, but not so much that I didn’t also think to take a deep breath as his hand withdrew past my face to see if his claws held any residue of the Cardinal‘s blood. I couldn’t find it in his scent profile.

 

***

 

I knew the man would be in the harshest stage of his fever when I got back to work, but he did look truly horrendous when I let myself back into his room, and it made my shoulders tense up to see anyone look so ravaged under my care- but especially him. His hair was plastered haphazardly to his face and the pillow; his skin was drained pallid and his eyes unfocused and his whole body trembled. Sweat glistened in the crooks of his tense, folded limbs and in the lines in his face, which looked achingly deep and drawn. His makeup of office was far too thick to have been fully shed, but it had smudged across his nose and on his hands and the pillow, and run in rivulets down his cheek; whether from sweat or frustrated tears or both I couldn’t tell and didn’t wish to pry into. 

“It’s me, Cardinal,“ I said gently as I took his temperature again, and it had climbed to 105 in the hour I’d been away. As usual, I kept my expression immobile- not that he was paying much attention to anything except his own laboured breathing, in any case- but I knew this was a dangerous level for a human, one at which they could faint, hallucinate and even seize. I changed the cold cloths I’d draped on his brow and shoulders as quickly as I could without unsettling him.

“‘Nk you,” he puffed faintly as I wiped his loose hair from his forehead and tucked it behind his pink ears. I hadn’t been entirely sure he was lucid enough to understand who I was or what was happening, but he managed it, somehow. I drew the desk chair close to the side of his bed and sat on it, leaning down so he could take my claws weakly in one hand again.

“It’s alright,” I assured him softly, running the pad of my thumb over his knuckles when he rested his fingers in mine. Even his fingertips were hot and clammy. “Do you think you could drink some cold water for me?”

He shuddered and let out a little “nnnh” noise at just the thought of sitting up and trying to swallow. 

“What about if I got a straw and held it for you?” 

He murmured in the negative again, and I didn’t press it. 

I felt a pang for him in such a state. He had no elemental power coursing in his cells to draw on, to balance and invigorate all the different structures in his complex little body with; there was nothing we could do now except wait it out, and if I wasn’t satisfied with where he was in an hour or two, I could resort to a cold saline drip.

Elements.

It’s a common misconception that hellbeasts are all primed for high temperatures; that we all come from some sort of cartoonish flame pit and relax in bubbling lava jacuzzis. A fire ghoul generally loves an arid environment and requires heated quarters all year round or he’ll grow sluggish and suffer joint pains, but an Aether, or myself and my Water brethren- we aren’t intrinsically linked to anything that makes heat more pleasurable. There’s more than one way to make a ghoul, but I was born the earthly way from a physical mating, and I had an Aether den mother in the Ministry’s nursery complex, though I don’t believe she was my biological carrier. I remembered how I complained about the heat of my first summer, and how she called on the coldness of the space beyond the clouds that she was privy to to cool the skin of her palms, and pressed them to my hot little head.

It was second nature to me now to pull marginally cooler or hotter water into my body with a thought for my own comfort, but somehow I had never tried to use it on another being. Could I produce a strong enough body temperature either way for it to significantly affect someone else, without just making myself feel uncomfortable and ill into the bargain?

I let the cooling effect I would normally make use of in summer creep under my skin, sliding into a controlled vision, playing faintly over my view of the darkened room.

_The lightness of water spray from the misting machines that kept the lawns lush, and the fresh juices from excess crops in the fruitery._ _The constant cool damp of the underground vaults, the oldest parts of the Ministry where a cooler-blooded ghoul could find a soothing stone to curl up on on the hottest days._

That was all so far, so plain for me. I doubted that I could emanate anything colder than the lower end of a normal human body temperature in this state. I needed to step it up, beyond the normal comfortable level of my elemental core. 

_ Winter rain that found its way into every crease, clung to you and chilled you until you ached a little. Still water beneath frozen winter pond ice, everything underneath dormant. _

My hands and feet took on the tingle of true cold, cold that someone would feel if they took my hand. Where my arms were exposed by my rolled-up sleeves, I felt the tough skin start to prickle; if I’d had hairs there like humans, they would have stood on end, like feather-stippled bird flesh. Most importantly, though, Copia started taking more interest in my hand through his on-and-off lucidity, his fingers twitching in my loose grasp.

I focused harder.  _ Glaciers _ . 

_ Dark ocean waves, ripples ever expanding, tipped by moonlight.  _

_ Further down, and then further down again, beyond what the humans even theorised their Earth might be; the black, numb depths, never touched by the sun once since its creation, the last liquid barrier before reaching the patient, bitter, ice-pocked and world-encompassing serpent. _

_ I let the low currents in. My body ached. _

This would have to work for my immediate purpose, or all I would be left with was painfully fallible human methods. I could go no further into the water without transcending the point of discomfort and compromising my own safety. Just because it ran in my nature, didn’t make me invulnerable to it. I steeled myself and pressed my deathly-cold palm to Copia’s cheek- 

And my work bore fruit. He nuzzled into it gratefully, sensing the chill he needed. I admit, I sighed with relief.

I kept my hands on his brow and neck for close to an hour, I think, before I tested his temperature again. There was a reduction, but it was frustratingly fractional.

Again, something was going to have to step up. The cold wasn’t just reserved for my palms; the effect was all-over, and if I could get closer contact with him, I would be able to transmit more of it to him.

This was going to be deeply, deeply unorthodox. This was going to look very strange to any human that might somehow look in- I was confident none would, but still. But this was also going to be the quickest, easiest solution.

“I have an idea to make it colder,” I spoke to him softly, “but it’s… going to mean me doing something strange.”

“Don’t care,” he breathed thickly, cheeking shakily at the cold of my palm.

“If you want me to stop, you just have to say so.”

He shook his head, already latched onto the idea regardless of how it worked. “Please.”

He whimpered lightly at the removal of my hand, but I had to unbutton my shirt and shed it from both arms. If he had any thoughts on this even despite the discomfort and fever- and if anyone was going to manage to, it was him- his hazy, already flushed face didn’t show it. I levered myself onto the edge of the bed beside him and then- oh, I hoped this worked, and I could barely believe I was daring to cross human boundaries like this at all, let alone with someone of his position- I was sinking to my side and reaching my arms around him, trying to bring as much fevered skin into contact with my cooling influence as possible.

His sigh of relief as he pressed his face into the crook of my shoulder made the fine line of thin spines on my tail prickle upright. I swallowed several nonhuman languages’ moderate curses and tried to keep my mind solely focused on cold, cold water. His lips kept pressing slightly at my bare neck and the warmth of his laboured breaths tickled my skin. I closed my eyes and centred again, drawing up the feeling of solidifying frost from the darkness within; I slid one hand up to his jaw, thumbing away the sweat, and started to comb my icy fingers through his hair. Even damp and mussed from his tossing and turning and clawing in his fever and headache, it was so soft. 

I reached back and adjusted his clinging arms so his wrists were flush with my flanks, cooling directly on his pulse points, and then fell back into a soothing rhythm, drawing hypnotic circles with my thumb on the small of his back and slowly, carefully stroking his scalp through his thick chestnut hair with the lightest of clawtip touches.

The motion was soothing to me, too; the temptation to sleep for the first time in a few weeks tugged at me, but I needed to stay awake to keep the still, cold water beneath my skin. With his bare front pressed against mine, I felt the slowing and deepening of his breathing, the rise and fall of his ribcage, as he started to calm and sleep. 

Ghouls don’t really hold each other the way humans do, not even as lovers; if we rest together we hunker down in curls side by side and occasionally on top of each other but without tangling limbs, like most Earthy mammals. The most I had experienced like this before was the much briefer greeting-type hugs that came from friendly Sisters, which I tolerated and took at face value for their sakes, even if they seemed rather tight and enclosing and aggravating to my sensibilities. But in this fraught situation, even with my unlikely bedmate in the throes of sickness... I did feel I could begin to understand the appeal. Aside from the physical effect of my forcedly cold touch helping his fever, it obviously soothed him emotionally to have something protective to cling to, like a kit sleeps in the crooks of its mother’s limbs holding her tail. I could have gone for some of that soothing myself, in that moment.

In the silence, I felt my mind wandering. So, Copia had been prowling around the rut quarantine quarters. Was this the only time he’d done so? Again, I’d heard many things from the more canny and sociable Siblings of the Ministry about the Cardinal since his abrupt ascension into the spotlight- apparently I’d been wrong to discount most of them as baseless human gossip. There were very few innocuous reasons a human would be in that area for any length of time. And again, I was aware that in a week or so, I would be confined there myself.

Would he try it again?

I was  _ acutely _ aware that I would soon be taking a ‘rest’ in the quarantine quarters, going by the jolt in my gut at the thought of his wanderings, and the way the strong, hot scent of his skin- all sweat and fear and constant human musk under my nose- made the word  _ lick  _ rise unbidden in my mind. Maybe my calculation was off. Maybe it was sooner than a week. I felt his leg twine between mine, and his rough-haired, soft-skinned underbelly rise and fall against mine in a deep sigh, and made a strongly-worded mental note to take a discreet test and check my hormone levels as soon as possible tomorrow.

At one point in the night, I felt him stir and say something indistinct. “Copia?” I asked softly, but there was no reply- he was murmuring in his sleep. I craned my neck back ever so slightly, to get a look at his face without ousting him from his nestled position. His closed eyelids had left dark smudges on my collarbones. He purred something again in what must have been his native human language; it sounded elegant and honeyed, but his brows knitted. I couldn’t tell if it was a good or bad dream, but it didn’t last long. He huffed a couple of times and wriggled, pressing his face back into my neck, and went still again. I felt his fingers twitch on my back, and then presently his breathing slowed back to a faint, puttering snore.

 

***

 

“Doctor?”

Oh, no.

I hadn’t slept; I’d been aware of the glow growing behind the blinds of the small window, and been thinking it was time to slither discretely off the bed before my high-ranking patient came round. I must have zoned out for a while and overrun my best guess at his body clock. 

His mismatched eyes were glittering close to mine now in the half-light; he had turned himself slightly in my loose grip and pulled himself up to my level. “I must assume there is a sound medical reason for, uh, this, but...” He gestured to the length of our bodies, still pressed together. “I have to say, the moment I agreed to this particular treatment is lost to my memory, which is a real shame.”

“You were burning with fever,” I tried not to stammer. “I had to use my water element to keep your skin cool. Not something a human doctor would have been able to do alone, for certain.” I squared my shoulders and stuck my chin out, as much as one can while lying on their side, anyway. “They would have taken a long time to drag you to a bath to bring your core temperature down and stave off a seizure. It may look odd, but I might well have saved your life.”

“I see.” Just for a moment, his expression softened. “In that case, I owe you… more thanks than a man can usefully express while he’s laid up in a hospital bed with… ah-” he retrieved a once-cold wetted cloth from where it was stuck to his shoulders- “only the bare minimum of his resources and, uh, dignity.” 

Then he was back to his normal self again, all hard eyes and one-sided grin. “Although, a little death in caring arms in the night; there are far worse ways to end one’s days on this plane than this, I think.”

“I can see you’re feeling much better,” I huffed. He was warm in my arms, but not that much more than you average human dragging their way out of the tail end of an infection fever should have been. Not that a human should have been in my arms at all. I finally let the ice water withdraw, feeling my skin return to normality by the second as it melted out of my veins and into... some other place.

“If I am,” he mused, “it must be a testament to your skills, when I was at Death’s door hours ago, no? But in that case, what are you still doing nested in my bed?” He pulled his shoulder back from my embrace, presenting his bandaged scars- and his bare chest- and patting the dressing idly with his index finger. “Perhaps you still need to... stay close and keep watch? Just to be sure all is well. Hmm?”

He had a point.


End file.
